Posted by Jesse Bering, Ph.D. in Quirky Little Things:


Last year I rented an old terraced house near the university. Every day I'd walk through the local park to get to my office on campus. And every day I'd pass by a lot of people on the way. People like me walking briskly to work and glancing at their watches, out-of-breath joggers pausing on the walkways, toddlers pulling up grass, students on benches studying for their morning exams, old men with their heads down lost in conversation, maintenance men with overflowing wheelbarrows. You get the idea. The place was buzzing with human activity. The thing is, these people might as well have been fire hydrants, broken tree branches, or trash bins since they registered about as much in my consciousness as these things.

And then I got Gulliver. Suddenly, these people were transformed into people--living, breathing, thinking people with minds and everything. Gulliver might have only been an 8-week-old Border Terrier puppy, but he was able to accomplish something I'd never been especially good at, which is getting people to smile. And when people smile in my direction, you see, my somewhat misanthropic disposition tends to evaporate in the blink of an eye and I become an absolute mess of a sweet-natured humanitarian. That first week I brought Gulliver to work with me, he followed me around the park like one of Lorenz's goslings, and everybody smiled at this. What's more, he was a social lubricant like nobody's business, and strangers found themselves striking up conversations with me if only in order to get to Gulliver. Not everyone likes dogs, of course, but to see a little happy guy like Gulliver and not get those warm, gooey, cuddly feelings, you'd have to be inhuman. (Seriously, is there anything like the smell of puppy breath?) Before long, I found myself listening with rapt attention to a teary-eyed businessman describing his long-dead boyhood dog, chatting up a bubbly twenty-something nurse about her emotionally crippled fiancé, exchanging business cards with a shy interior decorator with a skin condition, and sympathetically holding the elbow of an old woman whose husband had recently suffered a stroke, telling her it was all going to be just fine.